tsc

It was initially a joke, but when everyone became convinced, it was painful to watch.   There are some benefits to the fact that you did take it seriously, though, in valuable feedback on forum systems for the future and in other things that we learned.   Are you even serious right now?  Half the forum's calling you out, people are calling for you to step down, and you're acting like this is just some data that you were able to collect?  I'm sorry, but I have serious reservations about letting someone run this forum who just admitted to saying that he deliberately took something went too far, but golly gee I learned some interesting things about people today because of it, everyone!  Frankly, it's mildly disturbing.    Nowhere did I say it was justified by that, and nowhere should I be taken to say that what happened was acceptable because of the slight benefits accrued.

It was initially a joke, but when everyone became convinced, it was painful to watch.   There are some benefits to the fact that you did take it seriously, though, in valuable feedback on forum systems for the future and in other things that we learned.   The issue was our announcement being too close to Reddit. Everyone called it out and then we panicked. We probably should have stuck the course with only having our fully modified Reddit clone.

I agree that was problematic. None of us thought properly about how an early announcement would mean we would have to justify it until we were ready to release, and it seems that you all perceived those justifications to be realistic even though it was all a bunch of bullshit.

To which I'd have to refer back to an earlier post: I really would like to know what exactly it is that I've done that has been radical. The most radical would have to be the migration to IPB which I advocated and presided over, but that was generally accepted by the community. I don't think anything else has come even close to that. You are not at all innocent in that regard, Commander. Several of us recognized this as parody, but we abandoned our views when your straight-faced denials of such continued without end. If your audience does not recognize your ruse, then you have failed to tell a joke. I don't know where to lay the blame for that. In order for something like that to be effective, you have to act the part. Stephen Colbert would be a good example of that, since it's generally understood that he's parodying right-wing commentary and yet he plays the role. Since some of you recognized it, I don't understand how me continuing to act the part would convince you otherwise.

You can animate anything with SFM (provided you have rights, which Valve provides for all of their IP), but it appears that only TF2 stuff won.

The fact that you didn't realize how ridiculous it was does not invalidate that it was satire/parody, but this discussion has gotten massively off topic.

You're not really supposed to explain satire/parody. The whole point of it is for it to be readily apparent based on its ridiculousness.   The fact that it wasn't, as I have said, is troubling.

Actually, satire's not the right word. It was a parody through and through. But semantics don't matter much.

As I've said, I believe the point that went wrong is in the announcement. The belief was that a semi-early warning would be necessary to maintain believability, but it quite apparently was both too early and hinted too much at our actual plans that it caused issues, and we scrambled to change it (which we should have recognized, after the first incident of such . It was not my idea to actually announce and introduce it as a test site, but I will accept responsibility since I agreed to it.   As far as the satire point: it was an effective piece of satire, believable to the point where all of you fell for it. It certainly reflects badly on me and the rest of the admin team that you believed in our unquestioning unity to effect that radical of a change, when such a radical change would have been vigorously debated and most likely opposed by not only Rammite and binary but by me personally.

If I ever award Guy a promotion of my own volition I should be fired immediately.

Anyway, an apology. This did not go as well as I expected due to some unforeseen factors. In particular, it was idiotic for us to announce it two days before we planned to release it, and I will accept the blame for that on behalf of the admin team. Due to this, we quickly switched the plan from only releasing the Reddit site (which would probably have been more obvious as a joke) to releasing multiple sites and having you go to a random site based on IP address. This blew up when people changed sites and then didn't realize that the sites were completely different from one another - in particular, Guy changed from Reddit to Discourse and Witty changed from Discourse to NodeBB. These shenanigans prevented the joke from being as effective as it should have been, and people didn't interact enough to realize something was up when one person didn't appear on the site the were on and yet was complaining. I personally tried to leave hints at this (the beginning of Q2 2015 = early April, listing users across multiple sites, etc.) as much as I acted like this was real (defending the change, handwaving the site changes as "DNS problems", etc.).   For reference, here are the sites (which will be taken down over the next few days): http://discourse.next.spufpowered.com/ (Discourse) http://nodebb.next.spufpowered.com/ (NodeBB) http://reddit.next.spufpowered.com/ (Reddit) http://ipb.next.spufpowered.com/ (a redirect back to this forum, nothing special) Let me be clear: while Reddit, Discourse, and NodeBB are all wonderful platforms that I would love to run a community with, I remain committed to IPS until our needs change. I have even been considering buying new modules for IPS in the interest of expanding features available to you. This does mean that we will be forced to undergo the migration to IPS4, but I hope that I have provided you with enough notice and will be providing a full staged semi-open beta install for people to test, critique, and so on before we migrate to the final release.   Change is a radical thing - and I hope that you do realize that change of such a magnitude is just as hard on me as an administrator and technician as it is on you as a user. In fact, while most of you are almost comfortably settled into this forum, we are still dealing with issues introduced in the migration from vBulletin. That being said, I do like to make small changes that I believe will undoubtedly improve the user experience, but bigger changes should always be debated, as we have done several times already (in opening up the community and in doing a forum reshuffle).   In conclusion, I'd like to apologize to everyone, especially to the people who still think that I am serious 100% of the time. It's less than that, but not by much. It's time for you to laugh at me, laugh at the copious amounts of effort we put into the joke that didn't work out well, move on, get ready for IPS 4, and brace yourselves for an April Fools joke that probably won't be as good as this because we invested so much time here.

Would you like to list out all of the things that you accuse me of doing? I would be very curious to see this list.

I'd like to thank those users that have taken the time to register and post on the new site: Expresate, Huff, Guy923, Simon, XYTWO, Idiot Cube, Davjo, and Kayohgee. Your feedback is much appreciated.

No, I legitimately believe that the new format will be better for us in the long-term.   Godwin's Law, please.

We're migrating with an eye toward the future. Being satisfied with what we have prevents progress.

No migration has begun yet. This is a preview of what is to come a long time down the road.   As I've said, we don't expect this change to go live for another six months, and have targeted it for the beginning of Q2 2015.

To everyone raging, please do at least give it a try and make sure to interact with each other on the forum. That way you'll get a better understanding of how it works and can make a more informed decision.

I'm not paying anybody anything. I'm just having rational conversations with the people who are willing to be rational about this.

  We cannot avoid migrating to IPS4, because this is nowhere near ready, but it will not be our software in the long term. I'd estimate we're remaining on this for another 6 months while we iron things out.

Actually, Rammite just informed me that he hasn't actually been in the loop for a while now (or at least while the major changes were happening), and so he is no longer a reliable resource until he looks at the website. I didn't notice because I was too busy fixing the bugs that arose due to said major changes. I apologize for putting him on the spot when he is unqualified to talk about such things in greater detail.   That leaves binary.

I think that the apt summary for the past three pages is "gloom and doom and not much of major interest".

Nothing that I could show or say would do it justice. That's why I am deferring to binary and Rammite to make more descriptive comments as they feel necessary.

Binary's post summed it up best:   We are not taking feedback right now because we want to get the pure, unadulterated vision out to you first before considering any changes. We had hoped to get the preview out in the same day as the announcement, but issues cropping up prevented that from happening. Again, this change will not go live tomorrow, nor within the next week, and probably not even before the year ends. It will be a gradual process as we continue to tweak it and prepare this community for a migration over.

C++ has null pointers too.   I like C++ better for some reasons, though. Other languages are very limited in what they can do.